Tag Archives: Lock screen

On September 23, Microsoft detailed some of the new features delivered through the latest update of the Bing app on iPhone. With iOS 8, Apple did bulk up and two of the many features added were extensibility through sharing between apps as well as widgets on the notification screen.

The updated Bing app utilizes both of these features:

Bing Translator

With Bing Translator feature of the app installed as a supported shareable app in Safari, you can now instantly translate any web page in Safari. This feature is also of course available inside the Bing app itself, so if you need to translate search results it can be done within the app itself.

In addition to the translator, the Bing app now lets you choose Bing Today as a lock screen widget. This widget shows the Bing Image Of The Day, as well as three top trending topics. Clicking on the image leads to the front page inside the Bing app and clicking on any of the trending topics leads to the news items about those trending topics.

iOS 8 Lock Screen Widget ChooseriOS 8 Bing Today Widget

Microsoft has moved Bing’s value from a pure desktop web search engine to a vast pool of entities and relationships which get better as more people use the service. The more “end points” Bing has, the better the quality of the engine becomes. With this background it is easy to see why the Bing team would improve the Bing app for iPhone and jump on the latest technologies supported by the latest features of iOS.

Although most users who need to search on iOS can now use iOS 8’s updated Spotlight, it is still nice to use an app that lets you search not just the web, but also news, images, photos, videos, etc., and that’s what the Bing app lets you do.

One of Android team’s lead designer, Roman Nirk, has released a new lock screen widget known as DashClock. The widget aims to provide all the relevant notifications like missed calls, emails etc. on the lock screen.

As an Android user, I have always longed for a way to display relevant notifications on my phone’s lock screen, and this widget is like a dream come true for me. DashClock is one of Roman’s side project and is completely open source.

Below are the list of notifications that DashClock is capable of displaying -:

DashClock also supports Extensions allowing any Android developer to create a new ‘Extension’ for the widget to show relevant information on the lock screen. One such prime example being the Battery extension that is already available on the Play Store.

DashClock will only work on Android 4.2 running devices, since it makes uses of the new lock screen widget feature. This limits the widget to only the Nexus devices, and other devices running some sort of Android 4.2 based custom ROM.